Grip Area Modeling

[emills2]

i just saw the gorgeous https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=56225 post, and i couldn't help but notice the slight imperfection (subjective opinion) on the steering wheel grips, so i decided to fart around.

I think the result is neat, so decided to share. I think the technical aspects are somewhat interesting, even if the design itself is a bit exagerated and cartoonish.

Steering_Wheel_03_04.png (276.18 KiB) Viewed 3263 times

Steering_Wheel_03_05.png (549.39 KiB) Viewed 3263 times

Steering_Wheel_03_03.png (296.65 KiB) Viewed 3263 times

[chrisb]

Would you mind telling a bit about how you did it, which workbenches and tools you used?

[emills2]

Would you mind telling a bit about how you did it, which workbenches and tools you used?

sure.

part>revolve the torus, part>extrude the cutout volume, part>boolean to remove the cutout.

sketcher workbench sketches(important) to capture the edges i want to match on the edges of the cutout.

Silk workbench to convert the captured edges to control points, create the fancy curves, create a control grid from the fancy curves and control points, and slap a smooth surface with G2 along the length and G1 across the new cross section (one quarter of the cutout).

multiple Part>mirror to copy the new surface and close the gap.

then Part>shell (collect surfaces), Part>offset (inward), Part>solid (on both shells), Part>extrude the mini texture cutout, draft>Polar_ array, Part>boolean cutout from outer solid only, Part>fillet along the texture cuts.

Part>Fillet is working REALLY nice. i hadn't tried it since the edge selection was improved. I was pretty impressed to be able to even just select all the edges shown below...and then it actually filleted them!

Steering_Wheel_03_01.png (158.22 KiB) Viewed 3235 times

i haven't booleaned out the inside section from the outside section. that just takes time and doesn't affect the test i wanted to do.

[chrisb]

Thanks for reporting back. It's apparently far from trivial.

[emills2]

Thanks for reporting back. It's apparently far from trivial.

Well, all the Part workbench stuff goes really fast. The tricky part is deciding which topology to use with Silk. This is usually the case with these models. It takes a little bit of head scratching to set it all up, but it ends up at the minimum necessary complexity. Actually it just fails if you try to make it too complicated. But once you have it set up, it is incredibly rewarding and addictive.

check out this live editing animation:
https://github.com/edwardvmills/Silk/bl ... _01_01.gif

the feeling is pretty awesome once you can fine tune your objects like this. i'm not sure you can buy this feeling anywhere

[tom_hampton]

i just saw the gorgeous https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=56225 post, and i couldn't help but notice the slight imperfection (subjective opinion) on the steering wheel grips, so i decided to fart around.

I think the result is neat, so decided to share. I think the technical aspects are somewhat interesting, even if the design itself is a bit exagerated and cartoonish.

Hey, thanks for the compliments. You're right about the imperfections. I couldn't really figure a good way to model the grips. I settled on a pad of the Z-down view, then a revolved "groove" to get the profile close, and then some big fillets to blend the remaining rough edges.

grip.png (125.52 KiB) Viewed 2806 times

For what I was doing that was good enough for visualizing the space between the grip and the button plate. They don't show up too much in FreeCad, but they do stand out in any Povray renderings.

You're approach looks fantastic. Heck, I didn't even know about the Silk workbench! The revolved groove above is about the fanciest thing I've done.

[emills2]

For what I was doing that was good enough for visualizing the space between the grip and the button plate. They don't show up too much in FreeCad, but they do stand out in any Povray renderings.

The tesselated look in povray turns out really nice for regular objects, but for your revolve-grooved and filleted extrusion, you could lower the object's angular deviation and deflection tolerances in the view properties (before you export to povray). You could also do the whole model at higher surface resolution, but it has a nice feel as is for most objects.

Ang&Defl.PNG (22.46 KiB) Viewed 2751 times

[tom_hampton]

For what I was doing that was good enough for visualizing the space between the grip and the button plate. They don't show up too much in FreeCad, but they do stand out in any Povray renderings.

The tesselated look in povray turns out really nice for regular objects, but for your revolve-grooved and filleted extrusion, you could lower the object's angular deviation and deflection tolerances in the view properties (before you export to povray). You could also do the whole model at higher surface resolution, but it has a nice feel as is for most objects.

Thanks for that. I knew there had to be a way. Reset to:

Angular Def: 5*
Deviation: 0.1

FreeCAD:

freecad_grip.png (69.43 KiB) Viewed 2351 times

POVRAY:

povray_grip.png (72.79 KiB) Viewed 2351 times